Friday, January 26, stocks hit their last record highs. Buoyed by supposedly strong earnings along with near euphoria about tax reform anecdotes, all three major US indices were sitting at their respective tops after another big week. Everything was apparently going in the right direction: All the three key U.S. indexes closed at record levels on Friday following better-than-expected earnings [...]
Top Chinese leadership is taking further shape. With Xi Jinping’s continuing consolidation of power going on right this minute, most of the changes aren’t really changes, at least not internally. To the West, and to the mainstream, what the Chinese are doing seems odd, if not more than a little off. Unlike in the West, however, there is determined purpose [...]
In February 2018, it was like old times for the US industrial sectors. Prior to the 2015-16 downturn, the otherwise moribund economy did produce two genuine booms. The first in the auto sector, the other in energy. Without them, who knows what the no-recovery recovery would have looked like. They were for the longest time the only bright spots. The [...]
On July 15, 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sat in front of Congress for the second of his required Humphrey-Hawkins reports for that year. The original act meant for these to be more than bland economic obfuscation, where the original Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 demanded monetary targets. The Fed stopped being able to produce them [...]
Is there a seasonal pattern to oil prices? It is beginning to look that way, though statistical purests would object to a sample size of two. Over the past couple of years, the switch between “reflation” and anti-“reflation” has taken on a little too much familiarity in terms of time and timing. In the summer months between June and November [...]
The Chinese government reported estimates for Industrial Production, Retail Sales, and Fixed Asset Investment (FAI) for both January and February 2018. The National Bureau of Statistics prepares and calculates China’s major economic statistics in this manner at the beginning of each year due to the difficulties created by calendar effects (New Year Golden Week). Despite this attempt to offset them, [...]
If indeed this inflation hysteria has passed, its peak was surely late January. Even the stock market liquidations that showed up at that time were classified under that narrative. The economy was so good, it was bad; the Fed would be forced by rapid economic acceleration to speed themselves up before that acceleration got out of hand in uncontrolled consumer [...]
There has been a lot of talk about the economic impact of the recent tax reform. All of it, including the analyses that include lots of fancy math, amounts to nothing more than speculation, usually informed by little more than the political bias of the analyst. I am guilty of that too to some degree but I don't let my [...]
For the end-of-bond-bull-market-crowd, 3% is a line in the sand. There is no inherent significance in that number, except that it’s a round one. The benchmark 10s as of now trade with regard to that level as if it’s a ceiling. That’s what makes it so momentous. In 2013, the yield finally broke 3% the day after Christmas, getting as [...]
On May 16, 2000, the FOMC gathered around in Washington to debate taking more extreme measures. For nearly a year, Greenspan’s Federal Reserve had been “raising rates” in the now-familiar pattern. Adjusting their target for interest on federal funds, the Committee had by then increased it at all of the five previous policy meetings, each of them by a further [...]
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